Why measure absenteeism

All Rights Reserved. Scroll to Top. Absence Management Injury Management. Absence rate. Number of employees. Estimated days lost for. The average workforce over a period is equal to the average number of employees during that period. It is also possible to add other indicators such as management cost time spent managing this absence x hourly income allocated to the manager , or costs of organizational malfunctions overtime or replacement costs cost of a fixed-term contract or temporary work….

In order to have an efficient and fast analysis, it is essential to have a dashboard showing the right KPIs. With Powerslide you will be able to quickly build your dashboard which, in addition to offering you an accurate and simple visualization of the data, will be interactive. Log in. How to make an HR dashboard on absenteeism?

Simplify data storytelling with a simple, interactive and powerful platform. Produit Product Pricing Get started. Or an employee undergoing treatment for cancer? Such employees are likely to have more short-term absences — the very sort of absences that the Bradford Factor places more weighting on. Employers need to make reasonable allowances for circumstances like this, which is why the Bradford Factor should never be taken as scripture or used in isolation.

Treating absenteeism as a direct proxy for satisfaction is problematic for me. The relationship between job satisfaction and absenteeism can be moderated by a number of factors.

For example, an employee might be satisfied with the company, their compensation and many other factors, but extremely dissatisfied with their manager. To understand what I mean by this, think of a car dashboard. But the car is also monitoring a number of other metrics behind the scenes.

In the event that a problem arises, a warning light appears on the dashboard. That warning light is only there when you really need to see it. The same should be true of absenteeism. By all means track it, but think of it as a measurement that ticks along behind the scenes. In this way, absenteeism should be like a warning light that only flickers into life when you really need it to.

Absence rate and absence frequency also have interesting patterns over time. Research shows that as people age, avoidable absence goes down, especially for men. This could be because older employees take their work more seriously. This is also reflected in the graph below that displays sick leave days among adults by age in the US. So technically, older employees are more often ill compared to younger ones. However, research shows that they are much less likely to be absent in general.

Interestingly, the employee absenteeism rate within an organization is relatively stable. To determine whether an absence rate is high, we first need to look at what a normal absenteeism rate would be. As a rule of thumb, a 1. Note that weekend days are not included here and that this is an average.

Flu can knock someone out for 2 weeks, which will translate to 10 days which is a 4. However, organization-wide the absence rate can be very informative.

As a rule of thumb, any absence higher than 1. Unless your company has a killer employee wellness program , a lower rate could indicate that people are afraid to call in sick, so they come to work anyway. This is referred to as presenteeism , where employees work while sick, leading to productivity loss, poor health, and exhaustion. For the private sector, the rate was 2. Higher absence rates in Europe can be explained by higher levels of unionization and social security laws that protect employees.

The total cost of absence in Europe is estimated to be 2. These solutions help to reduce excessive absenteeism. Not only does it serve as a health check for your entire organization, when absenteeism rates are split up per department or unit, they also point out the problem areas in the organization.